Taylor

How much you spend on phone bills will depend, to a great extent, on the phone plan you subscribe for. The quality of service you enjoy, as a phone user, will also be greatly influenced by your choice of phone plan. You therefore need to be very careful, while choosing a phone plan to sign up for. And you need to ensure that you undertake proper due diligence, before opting for a specific phone plan. Remember, the wrong choice of a phone plan could end up costing you hundreds of even thousands of dollars in the long run. And on another note, the wrong choice of a phone plan could mean that you have to endure a very poor quality of service for the duration that you would be on the plan. So you need to be very careful.

Therefore, while choosing a phone plan, you need to:

Consider the cost of the plan: The question you need to ask yourself here is as to how much money you would be expected to pay, in terms of phone bills, under the plan. Then the next question is as to what you would be getting, in terms of ‘features’, under that particular plan. The question that would follow then is as to whether the plan would be good value for money – given how much you have to pay for it, and the features you would be getting. An important consideration here is at the maximum amount of money you would be willing to spend on phone bills, on a monthly basis. Then you need to ensure that the phone plan you sign up for is one where you will never find yourself having to spend beyond that ceiling. Note that this is not a question of opting for the cheapest phone plan. You may find a phone plan that is very cheap, but where you then have to endure a very limited experience. You may find one that is slightly costlier, but where you get to enjoy a better experience. So the most important thing is to look at the ‘value for money’ offered under the various plans, rather than just look at the prices/phone bills you have to pay under the various plans.

Look at how much data is available under the plan: The first question you need to ask yourself here is as to how much data you are likely to use on a monthly basis. Then you need to ensure that the phone plan you sign up for is one that allows you to use that much data. If you sign up for a phone plan with less data than you are likely to use in a month, you are likely to find yourself going past the data caps/limits regularly. You are then likely to find yourself having to pay ‘excess’ fees regularly – and the excess fees in question here can easily add up to hefty sums.

Look at how many phone calls you can make under the plan: Again, the first question you need to ask yourself is as to how many phone calls you are likely to need to make on a month-to-month basis. Then you need to sign up for a phone plan that allows you to make those many phone calls. If you are likely to make very many phone calls on a monthly basis, it would be prudent to opt for a phone plan that allows you to make ‘unlimited’ calls. Otherwise if you opt for one with ‘limits’ and you go past the limits, you could find yourself having to pay a bit of money for the extra usage.

Ask whether it is a prepaid or a postpaid plan: With a prepaid plan, you pay for the service before you use it. Conversely, with a postpaid plan, you pay for the service after using it. So the question you need to ask yourself here is as to whether you’d prefer an arrangement where you would be paying for the service before – or after—using it.

Ask whether it is a contract or contract-free plan: With a contract plan, you are bound to the service provider/carrier. If you opt to ditch the contract midstream, you have to incur a penalty. But then again, a contract plan can give you access to a good phone, which you would be paying for in installments (with the installments being part of your monthly phone bill). If you opt for a contract-free plan on the other hand, you would have to buy your own phone upfront. But then, your bills would be lower – because they wouldn’t include installments for the phone. And given that you wouldn’t be contractually bound, it would mean that you can ditch the plan at any time, without incurring penalties.

Consider the reputation of the carrier offering the plan: So here you need to look at things like quality of service, and the customer support that is available, as well as billing issues. You may need to look at the reviews of the various phone service providers, and actually talk to people who have subscribed for the services offered by various carriers. The most important thing is to ensure that you don’t get yourself entangled with a carrier who will cause you grief. Sometimes, it is even better to pay more, if that is what it takes to avoid the stress associated with the disreputable phone carriers.

Look at your needs as a phone user: This is perhaps the most important consideration, hence our decision to bring it in last. The most important thing is for you to carry out an objective assessment of your needs, as a phone user. Then you would need to ensure that the phone plan you sign up for is one that is best suited for those needs. If, for instance, you make lots of phone calls, you opt for a plan with ‘unlimited calls’. If you use plenty of data, you opt for a plan with ‘unlimited data’… Just consider your needs, against the various phone plans that are on offer, and then simply go for the one that is best suited to your needs. If you take that approach, you probably won’t regret your choice of a phone plan.

There are several strategies you can use, to ensure that you pay your phone bills on time. You can opt to set up an automatic bill payment arrangement, for the phone bills. Or you can opt to create reminders for yourself, with regard to the bill payments. You can go a step further, and ensure that you budget for the phone bills well in advance. We will now proceed to look at what each of those strategies entails:

Setting up automatic bill payment arrangements

So this is where you instruct your bank to be making the bill payments, on your behalf, using the money in your account, after a certain interval (without fail). This system can work very well if, for instance, you have subscribed for a phone plan where you pay a fixed amount of money monthly. Then you would be assured that every month, on a certain date, your phone bills would be automatically paid – as long as you have enough money in your account. And if, at some point, you don’t have enough money in your account to pay the bill on the stated date, the bank can send you alerts to that effect (well in advance). Then you can proceed to replenish your account, to ensure that there is enough money to pay the bills on the due date. Or you can make other arrangements for the phone bill payments: whatever it takes to ensure that the bill payment isn’t delayed.

There is also the arrangement where you can give your phone carrier your credit card/debit card number. The idea would be to bill that credit card/debit card on monthly cycles. So when payment date for the phone bills comes, funds would be deducted from the credit card/debit card automatically – and used to pay the phone bills. And this means that you would have peace of mind in knowing that your phone bills are automatically catered for, as long as you have some funds in the debit card/credit card used for the purpose.

Creating reminders for the phone bills

So this is where you start by figuring out what the best date for you to be paying the phone bills is. Then you create reminders for yourself (on your calendar, or using a ‘post it’), to the effect that on such and such a date, you would need to make phone bill payments. Nowadays, we have all sorts of personal scheduling apps for mobile devices that you can use for this purpose. The most important thing here is to have something to remind you as the date when you are supposed to make the phone bill payments approaches. That is better than having a system that only reminds you that you need to make the phone bill payments on the very date when the bills are due! Remember, to pay the phone bills, you will need to have both time and money. So you need to have something to remind you that you need to pay your phone bill on such and such a date (well in advance). This would then give you the opportunity to set aside time for the task, and to organize your finances in order to be able to honor the payment… With these sorts of reminders, it is very unlikely that you would end up delaying in making the phone bill payments.

Of course, if you opt to use this strategy, you need to get yourself to respect the ‘reminders’ unfailingly. There are people who have systems to remind them that on such and such dates, they are supposed to perform such and such tasks. Yet, even when they are reminded, they fail to honor the reminders – making the whole system pointless. So the key thing here is to avoid procrastination. If your ‘reminders’ tell you that you are supposed to pay your phone bill on such and such a date, you need to go ahead and actually make the payment. Even if it is the not the last possible date to pay the phone bills, you still need to make the payment. Otherwise you will keep procrastinating, and you will soon find yourself facing a deadline: in terms of the last possible date on which you can pay the phone bill. Then if you procrastinate further, you will already be deemed to have delayed your payment. That would possibly lead to a situation where your phone line would be disconnected. And the phone service provider may even report you to a credit bureau, thus messing up your credit score.

Budgeting for the phone bills well in advance

There is one key reason as to why people fail to pay their phone bills on time. It is usually not that they are unable to remember to make the payments. Neither is it usually due to lack of time to make the payments (after all, these payments take very little time nowadays). Rather, in most cases, you tend to find that the reason as to why people are unable to make their phone bill payments on time is due to lack of money. So you find that the date when you are supposed to make the phone bill payments arrives, and you suddenly realize that you don’t have the money to make the payment! The way to avoid finding yourself in this situation is by budgeting for the phone bills well in advance. This way, you’d always be having the money to pay the phone bills, when they fall due.

It is a good idea to allocate the money for the phone bill payments from the previous months’ earnings. Thus, for instance, you can have July phone bill payments budgeted for from June earnings. This way, even if there is a delay in processing your paycheck, you would still be able to make the phone bill payment on time.

This idea of budgeting for phone bill payments well in advance is not hard to implement – keeping in mind the fact that personal phone bills tend to be rather modest. There is usually no reason as to why you can’t set aside a few bucks (sometimes as little as $30 or $50) from this month’s paycheck, to cater for next month’s phone bill. With that sort of arrangement, you will be well assured that a situation would never arise where you would be unable to find money to pay the phone bill.

Like many other people, you may have gotten to a point where you feel that you are spending too much on your phone bills. This would lead into a situation where you start entertaining the question as to whether it is possible to lower your phone bills. That would in turn lead to another question, as to how exactly you can go about lowering your phone bills (if at all it is possible to lower them). Those are the questions we will be attempting to answer in this article.

With respect to the first question (on whether it is possible to lower your phone bills), the answer is ‘yes’. It is possible to lower your phone bills. There are people who were previously spending huge sums of money on phone bills, but they have subsequently managed to lower the phone bills by huge margins. So this is where, for instance, you find an individual who was spending, say, $100 per month on phone bills, and who has subsequently managed to lower it to $50 per month. So it is definitely something that can be done.

With respect to the second question (on how phone bills can be lowered), the answer is in that there are two simple things you can do, to reduce the amount of money you spend on phone bills. You can start by opting for a phone service provider and phone plan that is well aligned to your needs. Then you can make a conscious choice to be utilizing your data prudently. That way, you may be able to cut the amount of money you spend on phone bills by huge margins. We will now proceed to look at those strategies (through which you can lower your phone bills) in greater detail.

Making the right choice of a phone service provider and phone plan

So the first step here is to list the phone service providers/carriers in your area: these being the service providers/carriers you can potentially sign up with. The next step would be to find out what phone plans each of the service providers/carriers has to offer. What is the cost of each phone plan, and what is included in each phone plan? Remember, it is possible to find two service providers/carriers, who are offering similar phone plans (with similar features), yet charging vastly different sums of money for the plans. In your search, it would be a good idea to also include the Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), as these tend to offer very good rates.

The next step would be to look at your phone usage habits. What do you use your phone mostly for? Is it mostly for making calls? Or are you a smart-phone user, who mostly uses data – as opposed to someone who mostly uses the phone for making calls? How much data do you use per month? So you need to have a good profile of yourself as a phone user.

What you need to do next is to check through the phone plans you collected in the first step, and choose the one that is best aligned to your needs. Like if, for instance, you are a heavy user of data, you can opt for a plan that gives you ‘unlimited’ data. If on the other hand, you are a person who mostly uses your phone for making calls (while using very little data), you can opt for a plan that offers ‘unlimited’ calls.

The idea is to avoid signing up for a phone plan where you end up paying for things you don’t need. Like if you are a person who mainly uses your phone for making calls, yet you sign up for a ‘unlimited’ data plan – you will end up paying more for the ‘unlimited’ data, yet that is something you won’t actually be using.

If you are paying more in terms of phone bills than you (feel you) should be paying, then it is likely that you are paying for things you don’t need. So you need to identify the things that you don’t need that you are paying for, and opt out of the phone plan that includes such.

It is also at this point where the question of paying your phone price installments as part of your phone bills comes in. Many of the people who pay hefty phone bills find that their phone bills have two components. One component is for using the phone services, and the other component is for payment of the phone installments. The way to avoid paying such installments is by opting for a ‘no-contract’ phone plan. So you would buy your phone upfront, and then on a monthly basis, you would only be paying for the phone usage services. This would also give you an opportunity to buy a phone that is ‘unlocked’ – that is, a phone with which you can switch service providers/carriers.

Utilizing your data prudently

Nowadays, most phone plans come with a ‘data’ component. So in the phone bill, you pay for the calls you make, the texts you send, and the data you use. And for many of the people who pay more than they should be paying, the problem turns out to be due to the ‘data’ component. You see, many of the phone plans out there come with data caps/limits. Once you go past the data caps/limits, you are charged very high rates for data usage thereafter. You could find that what you end up paying, at the end of the month, is twice or even thrice what you’d have paid, if you hadn’t exceeded the data cap.

If you are using a phone plan that comes with such a data cap, you need to put in every effort to ensure that you don’t go past the data cap/limit. This may be a question of using Wi-Fi whenever and wherever you can (keeping data security concerns in mind as well). It may also be a question of turning off background data usage in various apps. So you need to do whatever it takes to ensure that you don’t go past the data cap/limit. But if your needs are such that you keep going past the data cap/limit, then the best solution for you may be where you switch to a plan that allows you ‘unlimited’ data. A plan with unlimited data is obviously likely to cost more. But the extra amount you pay is still likely to be lower than what you’d otherwise have to keep on spending paying ‘penalties’ for going past the data limit/data cap.